Interview with David Sønstebø

SatoshiPay live-demo with IOTA flash-channels

Online payments

Today, online sales are done with a few conditions.

Usually, these conditions involve paying high transaction fees, time for the registration, an agreement to a monthly payment, loading up a customer account or reaching a minimum order level before buyers are able to purchase things online, while security standards are not always on the highest level.

These issues apply to both sides, customers, and suppliers.

Requirements of these online-payments can be diverse for both parties:

Requirements for Buyer

Requirements for Seller

Highest security

Highest security

Insurance in case of a loss/damage

Reliability of the payments and network

Low fees

Low transaction fees

Cancellation option

Minimization of shortfall in payment

High acceptability

Cost-efficient implementation

Usability

Simple management

Low time for delivery

Speedy payment procedure

Low Hardware-requirements

Low running costs

E-commerce in 2017 can be, therefore, many things. Todays payment-options are either fast, cheap, or simple, but not all in once due to the technical limitations of the common systems such as high transaction fees, clunky processes due to security reasons, or minimum order value.

Satoshipay

2014 Satoshipay was founded by Meinhard Benn (CEO), Henning Peters (Technical Advisor), Kilian Thalhammer (Payment Advisor) in London, with their headquarters in Berlin.

Satoshipay enabled e-commerce payments when they started with Bitcoin, but after months of developing, testing and strategic decisions, they decided to go with IOTA instead.

With IOTA as the backend technology, SatoshiPay is able to offer the highest standards of online-payments with all advantages.

Incredibly fast

Lowest fees

Decentralized, reliable system

100% Data-integrity for secure payments

No third-party access

No minimum order value

True micro-payments

Easy integration for websites

Low running costs

One practical use-case of buying an online daily news-article, therefore, can be a new experience.
As many providers offer a membership with a flat-rate, or monthly price for access to an article section, it’s practically impossible to buy just a single article for a quarter, online, without any further liability.
SatoshiPay enables a new form of online payments where customers will be able to pay for a single article without having to bother about any requirements on top of that.

This barrier-free solution is the future of online payments as it combines all perks a payment provider can offer today.

IOTA’s Tangle architecture makes it furthermore future-proof, as the system becomes faster, the more people use it and a quantum-proof algorithm is integrated for the challenges of tomorrow.

The Satoshipay IOTA Flash Demo

The SatoshiPay + IOTA proof-of-concept demo shows how the powerful IOTA system can be used as the settlement system in SatoshiPay’s backend to execute payments over the web.

Originally, SatoshiPay used the Bitcoin blockchain as settlement layer, the only viable option at the time. But as the transaction fees in the Bitcoin network increased to unacceptable levels, it was necessary to switch to a system which could provide a long-term, scalable solution for transacting nanopayments at speed.

The IOTA distributed ledger technology is exactly such a solution. The IOTA network (the “Tangle”), offers zero-fee transactions and does not limit the number of transactions per second, making it unique among cryptocurrencies and an ideal ledger technology for SatoshiPay’s future needs.

Satoshipay writes:

As of today, we have a working demo that supports initial funding of the SatoshiPay web wallet with IOTAs, nano payments for individual content items and pay-outs to content publishers. As with the current SatoshiPay solution, no extra software needs to be downloaded by the consumer and there is no log-in. The consumer also never gives up control over their funds, because their private keys approving fund transfers is never shared with SatoshiPay.

When a user visits a website with SatoshiPay installed, an IOTA wallet is immediately created on their behalf in the browser.

To begin the demo, start by filling your IOTA wallet. In our demo, the wallet will be funded for free. Notice that there’s a zero in the center of the orange circle located in the bottom right-hand corner of the website. This means that your wallet’s balance is currently 0i. Let’s change this by filling your wallet: Start by clicking the orange circle located in the bottom right-hand corner of the website to open the wallet. Click “Fund the Channel”, wait a few seconds for the proof-of-work to finish, and you’ll now see a positive balance in your wallet. (Proof-of-work is required to participate in the IOTA network, the Tangle.)

Close out of the wallet and scroll down on the demo website to find the “See it in action” section. In this section, there are links to various content items. Click on any one of them and notice that the content is behind a paywall.

This content is accessed for just fractions of a cent, and denominated in IOTA (see exchange price here). Click the orange “Pay -amount- i” button located at the upper left-hand corner of the content, wait a few seconds, and the content will become available to you! 90% of the IOTA paid is transferred to the content owner, while SatoshiPay deducts a flat 10% service fee. No other payment service provider has ever been able to enable transactions this small at such a low fee. This is nano payment magic.

Troubleshooting: It may take a few seconds for the content to load after making the payment. If it takes longer than 10 seconds, open your wallet (by clicking the orange circle in the bottom right-hand corner of the website) and click “Channel Transactions”. Doing this should allow the content to properly load. Remember that this demo is only meant to be used on a Google Chrome browser.

Rinse & repeat. For every content item the content owner sells, there’s a flat 10% fee charged by SatoshiPay. No matter how high or low the price, no matter how many sales. The content owner is paid out in IOTA tokens, which can then, in turn, be converted into fiat (Euro, Dollars, etc.) via an exchange. Feel free to purchase more content items on the demo website, explore the wallet’s past transactions, or even reset the demo and start over.

When finished, go to the wallet and press “Close Channel”. Your Flash Channel will be closed and your transaction bundle will be attached to the main Tangle. You can still reset the demo after that.

Technical Highlights

IOTA’s Flash Network:

While the IOTA Tangle only increases in speed as more users adopt it – to a point where there is for “all practical purposes unlimited throughput” – the Flash Network is a protocol implemented to make sure large volumes of transactions can be performed at speed today. Over time, as the Tangle adoption rate grows, the IOTA Flash Network will not be needed.

The creation of the proof-of-concept website coincided with the announcement and early release of IOTA’s new Flash Network technology, which allows instantaneous payments by creating a layer on top of the IOTA ledger. Our demo features a fully browser-based implementation of the Flash Network.

SatoshiPay’s Settlement System:

SatoshiPay is an interface that creates paywall features straight in the browser and interacts with a settlement network in the back (in the present case, the IOTA Tangle). By installing the SatoshiPay widget on a website, a content owner is able to sell content directly to their visitors without asking them to log in or install anything.

It works by installing a crypto-wallet in the user’s browser, over which the user has full control (i.e. neither SatoshiPay nor any 3rd party can’t touch any of the funds on the wallet), that can transact directly with the website owner. Because SatoshiPay facilitates peer-to-peer transactions between two participants on a distributed ledger, there’s much lower friction and overheads. This means it’s economically feasible to transact in super-small amounts, while only charging 10% tx fee (compared to existing payment service providers, who’ll tend to have a 30c min fee + 2-5%).

@TechCrunch Would love that for the cryptospace, together with a standard they had to accept like using primary sources, commentaries have to be marked as such and conflicts of interests should be marked at the beginning of an article. Crypto desperately needs a standard. #iota #btc #eth